


Small Coffee: £1.69, No Refills.

by heddychaa



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, Mortality, Romance, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heddychaa/pseuds/heddychaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suzie Costello told them that when they died there was nothing there but darkness. And maybe she had a hundred tiny sadistic reasons to lie, but they all knew she wasn't. Not about this. So Ianto cleaned up their mugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Coffee: £1.69, No Refills.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the redisourcolor challenge [005: Darkness](http://community.livejournal.com/redisourcolor/11417.html). Beta-d by _lullabelle_ and azn_jack_fiend, my lovely partners in crime. Um, despite the content/summary, this fic is. . . weirdly schmoopy, for me. I don't. . . know? I FELT LIKE WRITING A SQUISHY WHITE CAKE FIC WITH A JAM FILLING AND SPRINKLES, OKAY?

_Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.  
\- Ayaan Hirsi Ali_

 

After Suzie comes back and they kill her a second time, Gwen tries to say that maybe it's just like those nights you sleep and don't dream, and that isn't so bad, really. All of them around the table hold their mugs closer, at that, as though they are trying to cling to the last source of warmth against a cold darkness that is enfolding them.

Jack, at the head of the table, just turns his eyes downward and doesn't say anything at all.

Ianto thinks of Lisa.

He lets himself go numb and placid after that, allowing himself to sink into the creases and starch of his suit. He stands and takes their mugs one by one, prying them from four sets of defiant, denial-rigid hands. As he walks down the stairs, taking the steps one at a time, he watches his tray. The five mugs huddle together at the centre, handles out, shuddering. He doesn't see anything but blackness at the pit of them. Just leftover coffee, he reminds himself, and goes to wash them out.

-

Filling out the internal incident report, he finds himself reading the one filed about Lisa. The remains of a cyber-conversion unit and a partially converted but disabled Cyberman fully incinerated. Two casualties released to families after debriefing and administration of retcon by Gwen Cooper. Torchwood employee Ianto Jones reprimanded and suspended with pay for a period of four (4) weeks to return to active duty at the sole discretion of Captain Jack Harkness.

Not even a funeral. But what was the purpose of it, of any of those silly traditions, if all they were doing was sending you off to endless darkness? Not even darkness. Darkness you could perceive and conceptualize. He could turn out the light here in the archives and be in the darkness. His eyes could adjust to the darkness, and even if they didn't, he could hear, he could taste, he could smell, he could touch and think and fear and sense. Not darkness, then. Nothingness. Non-existence. Forgetting. Even if you did couch it in nice terms like "dreamless sleep".

-

It's cold in the morgue. The temperature of bitter sea winds in late autumn, except the air here is stale and recycled and clinical. The edges of the clipboard bite into the fleshy inside of his upper arms where he's hugging it so tightly. He steals glances over at Jack, who has his hands in his pockets, a vague, sad smile on his face.

They're going to drawer Suzie for the last time, tonight.

Bodies stacked on bodies stacked on bodies stacked on bodies stacked on bodies. Padlocks and codes and number plaques and sealed doors and darkness and cold. Suzie, and one day Gwen, and one day Owen and one day Tosh and one day Jack and one day Ianto himself, all of them stacked together in the darkness. Filed away. Forgotten.

"I've still got that stopwatch," he says, and reaches out, tentatively, desperately, to the one source of warmth. Something inside him pulses and unfurls.

-

Jack has been gone three weeks when the blue police box appears wedged up in the corner of Ianto's living room, setting his mug rattling across the coffee table and turning his telly reception to static. Not taking his eyes off it, he fumbles with one hand over the end table behind him for his gun, snatching the grip into his slick palm.

He clambers cautiously to his feet, his socks slipping on the hardwood floor, and aims at the door of the box. The room is dark, the shadows shifting in the television static. The air is all charged with electricity, all the hair on his arms standing on end. The polished wood of the box reflects the black and white crackle of the television at his shoulder. He takes deep, measured breaths, tightening his grip finger by finger, peering down the barrel.

He jolts when the door creaks open. The room fills with gold-orange light, stinging his eyes.

"Ianto."

It's Jack, looking sheepish, his coat buttoned up over his chest and cinched across his waist. He closes the door of the box behind him and they're bathed in darkness again, just the light of television playing out on one side of Jack's face.

Ianto lowers his gun an inch. "Jack," he greets, flatly. "You're back."

"Yes and no," Jack replies. "I had to come some place where I knew you'd be alone. Sorry. Guess I forgot that I shouldn't have expected a warm welcome."

"So then?"

He sighs. "Me, the present me, is away with the Doctor, _my_ Doctor right now." He pats the door of the police box in illustration. "But I'll be back to you soon, although that's really all I can say about it. Sorry about the, uh, Himalayas. . . thing."

Ianto feels his face twist a little, a little twinge in his chest that he thought he was past feeling. "So. . . you come back. But then you leave again, obviously." (He wants to say "Leave _me_ again", but doesn't, testament to his self-control.) "If you're with him now," he finishes lamely.

In the white-gray light of the telly, Ianto can see a wince in the corners of Jack's eyes. Not the expression of a man facing an accusation, then. He'd be indignant, defensive. No. A man keeping a secret. "Can you just. . . can you put down the gun?" he asks, pained, and looks over his shoulder. "I don't have long."

The realization of what's happening here hits Ianto like a punch to the stomach. The gun drops to his side.

He's in Jack's arms, then, his nose smushed against the wool of Jack's shoulder. Looking at the static of the telly. And Jack is holding him against the darkness, gritting out "Sorry" over and over, his breath damp against Ianto's neck. Their hearts beat hot and alive together, a tiny defiant light.

Ianto doesn't ask him how long he has, or how it will happen, or what drawer they will store him in. He doesn't think about the encroaching darkness or the cold or the black at the bottom of a mug of coffee. He just rests a hand on the centre of Jack's chest, feeling the thrum of life in him.

"Is it good?" he asks. "The rest of our time together?"

Jack rocks his head back and forth as though he's weighing and measuring something, really considering the best answer. He settles on an enthusiastic, "Oh, _yeah_."

Like love and life and mortality are a particularly delicious pudding.

-

On his way out, Jack pauses at the door of the blue box with his back to Ianto and is silhouetted by that gaudy gold light that floods to fill the whole flat. In the background, inside the box, Ianto can see a skinny man in a professor's jacket flitting to and fro at a huge console impatiently. The whole thing's absolutely mad and amazing and impossible.

Jack looks back at him over his shoulder, casting his face in profile. "Oh, and Ianto?" he says, "I'm not going _anywhere_. I'll be here for as long as you need me."

Ianto smiles bravely. "That goes for you, too, Jack."

In the glow of the gold light, he draws his hands awkwardly up and down the lengths of his thighs, that old gesture of a man who doesn't want a date to end and lingers too long at the door. Takes a resolute step back. Away from the box, away from the closing door, away from Jack.

Back into the living room, back into a very ordinary darkness, back into the flickering electric light of late night television.

Back into a solid chest and solid arms and a good-natured laugh into his hair.

And then he's turned by the shoulders so that they are nestled chest-to-chest and belly-to-belly, breathing against one another like the complementary halves of a yin yang. This Jack's grinning, breathless, looking a little worse for wear but otherwise much the same as always. Who knows how long it's been, for him. He gathers Ianto in tight, their noses and mouths drawn up together, and talks right into his mouth as though Jack can't bear even an inch of separation: "That _was_ an invitation, wasn't it? Because it sounded like one from my end."


End file.
